Apprenticeship programs in Atlantic region soon to be harmonized

Adam Smith is a second year apprentice in construction electrical at the Nova Scotia Community College Waterfront campus. Fundamental changes are coming to make it easier to move through the apprenticeship process. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff)

Adam Smith kept hearing rumours while he answered the phones at Teletech Holdings Inc.’s call centre — rumours the company’s contracts weren’t going to be renewed and that he’d soon be out of a job.

He decided to make a change, but didn’t want to wait two years to get into the construction electrician course at Nova Scotia Community College. So he paid what he says was twice the tuition to enrol at Eastern College in Saint John, N.B.

“It was a great decision,” said Smith, now 28. “I was going nowhere with a job. I had no job security.”

And just a couple of months later, in 2012, while he was in school, the call centre closed its doors.

Now, he’s an apprentice at a Halifax-area company, earning more money than at the call centre and finishing up the last week of another block of training. He’s one step closer to writing the Red Seal exam that will allow him to work as a qualified journeyman anywhere in Canada.

Smith is one of more than 1,200 apprentices in the construction electrician trade in Nova Scotia and among close to 4,000 in the Atlantic region who will see fundamental changes to their requirements designed to make it easier to move through the apprenticeship process.

In May, the Atlantic premiers signed a memorandum of understanding to harmonize apprenticeship training and standards for 10 trades in the region.

“Before this agreement, there were 13 separate apprenticeship regimes across the country,” Kelly Regan, minister of labour and advanced education, said in an interview this week.

“Now the Atlantic provinces are beginning the process of harmonizing these … trades so that a cook can begin their training in Nova Scotia and they may end up in P.E.I. along the way and they know that (training) block A will be the same in Nova Scotia as it will be in P.E.I. or Newfoundland or New Brunswick.”

The changes will start with the construction electrician, cook, bricklayer and instrumentation and control technician trades and continue later with the rest. The remaining six have yet to be chosen.

“All 10 trades … (are being) picked because they all represent about 60 per cent of all apprentices coming through the system,” said Marjorie Davison, executive director for policy with the labour and advanced education.

There are distinct differences in some of the trades: some are compulsory in some provinces and not in others, the requirements vary and some are identified and defined very differently and will require regulatory changes, Davison said.

As part of this new agreement, the 10 chosen trades will have common trade names, the same number of hours needed to become qualified, curriculum standards and order to the training as well as completion requirements.

The plan is to have all the changes in place by 2017, but “we would hopefully by next year at this time have these four (initial) trades done,” Davison said.

The changes will allow apprentices to move freely from one province to the next, knowing their training will be the same so they can get through the program “as quickly as possible,” Regan said.

Smith said he didn’t have an issue finding a local employer to take him on as part of the apprenticeship program, but knows some people who are still trying to find an apprenticeship in this province.

Now, under the new rules, when there is no work available in one Atlantic province, people will be able to find work in one of the region’s other jurisdictions “instead of having all these trades go to Alberta,” he said.

The province hopes this Atlantic agreement will address, at least in part, the issue of labour mobility, Regan said.

Another concern is the low number of employers participating in the apprenticeship program, making it difficult for someone starting out to meet the journeyman requirements.

In 2013-2014, there were more than 1,749 employers in Nova Scotia with registered apprentices. Depending on the studies, that’s only between 18 to 27 per cent of all employers in the province who could take part in the program, the minister said.

“The province was frustrated by the fact that employers weren’t stepping up and taking on more apprentices,” Duncan Williams, president of the Construction Association of Nova Scotia, said.

Employers were equally frustrated because classroom training would be offered during the peak construction season, so “nobody would go,” he said.

“There was a complete breakdown in terms of how this program should be structured to suit the industry. … With all due respect to the folks in government, they don’t know the industry and they don’t know the pressures.”

That is one of the biggest changes the industry will see, he said.

Starting July 1, Nova Scotia will have a new group in place to oversee apprenticeship in the province. A nationwide search is underway for a CEO to lead the Nova Scotia Apprenticeship Agency and its board members, which include people from the trades.

This new agency will help direct the training that apprentices get and what gets studied when, depending on what the industry and employers need, Regan said.

“Having industry perspective right there on a board to say, ‘OK, that’s a great idea, however, this is the peak season or this is the shoulder season, this is when we should put on training or we don’t need this many trades or we do need this many,’” Williams said. “It’s going to be a lot more real-time and responsiveness built into the system.”

Williams said he hoped the agency will also help address the difficulty some tradespeople-in-training have had trying to return from other provinces, a process that is “more cumbersome than it needs to be.”

Nova Scotia recently made changes so the minister can enter into agreements with other provinces, which the government said should make it easier for apprentices to complete their programs without interruption.

Williams said the previous NDP government made a commitment to the industry to make changes and the current administration continues to push that agenda.

“Essentially, everybody recognized that (the system) wasn’t broken,” he said. “But it could certainly be improved quite dramatically and this is where we’re going.”

Smith still has another two years or so to finish his apprenticeship training and is looking forward to getting his Red Seal, and maybe elevator or communications certifications.

He’s interested in seeing the changes implemented, not just for his own program but those people he’ll work with in the future.

“The other apprentices coming in that are going to be training underneath me perhaps someday,” he said, “I will expect them to know what they’re doing because everywhere it’s going to be the same thing.”

TRADES

There are 66 designated trades in the province of Nova Scotia. In 2013-2014, there were:

6,023 active apprentices

1,533 new apprentices

More than 1,749 employers with apprentices in the program

932 Certificates of Qualification issued

833 inter-provincial Red Seals issued

Source: Department of Labour and Advanced Education

The memorandum of understanding between the Atlantic premiers will lead to changes in 10 trades within the next four years, including training standards and the amount of work experience required to become a qualified journeyman.

For the four trades now under review, the apprenticeship terms in each province currently are: